This blog serves my Congress course (Claremont McKenna College Government 101) for the spring of 2018.

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I shall post videos, graphs, news stories, and other material there. We shall use some of this material in class, and you may review the rest at your convenience. You will all receive invitations to post to the blog. (Please let me know if you do not get such an invitation.) I encourage you to use the blog in these ways:

To post questions or comments about the readings before we discuss them in class;To follow up on class discussions with additional comments or questions.To post relevant news items or videos.

There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges.

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Thursday, December 8, 2016

The Wealthiest Counties did not vote for Hillary Clinton, but the Poorest Counties did.

Breitbart recently published an article saying that, had it not been for the coastal elite in 52 counties, the election would have been a slam dunk for Donald Trump.

This narrative is false. While Trump tied with Hillary Clinton on voters who earned more than $250K/year or more, the idea that Trump won everything except for the Bougie coastal elites is flat-out wrong. I used the U.S. Census Bureaudata from 2010 and county-level election data from November, and examined the fifty counties with the highest Median Household Income. 25 of them voted for Trump, and many of them by sizable margins. Here's a map I made with Microsoft Paint for more perspective:

In fact, only 16 of the named 52 counties made the cut from the original Breitbart article.

50 wealthiest counties:
--25 voted for Donald Trump
----Of these 25, 14 were in Southern or Midwestern states
----Some of these counties, like Sussex County, NJ voted for Donald Trump by more than 30 points
--9 voted for Hillary Clinton
----These were likely not included in the original Breitbart article because they were either close, like Queen Anne's County, MD or not on the coast, like Oakland County, MI
--16 are the "Coastal Elite" counties that Breitbart selects
----Of these 16, 8 are in Northern Virginia, and an additional 3 are in Maryland. The remaining 5 are split between California (3), New York (1), and Massachusetts (1)
------Of the 8 in Northern Virginia, 4 are independent cities with small size

By contrast, of the 50 poorest counties in America, 2/3 (33) voted for Hillary Clinton. This is especially poignant, given that Donald Trump won far more counties than Hillary Clinton. Of these 33 counties that voted for Hillary, 5 are Hispanic majority, 3 are Native American majority, and 25 are African-American majority. 16 of the 17 poorest counties that Donald Trump won are more than 75% white (Luna County, NM is actually Hispanic majority). Here's another map I made with MS Paint to outline where the poorest counties are and how they voted:

Breitbart is not the only publication to accuse HRC for going for the elite coastal vote. It is certainly true that the wealthiest counties are concentrated in super zip-heavy coasts surrounding DC and New York. Nevertheless, the idea that this election was America's poor and working class heartland vs. the coastal elites misunderstands both the distribution of wealth and politics in America.